Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By : Alessandro Molina
Book Image

Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

By: Alessandro Molina

Overview of this book

The Python 3 Standard Library is a vast array of modules that you can use for developing various kinds of applications. It contains an exhaustive list of libraries, and this book will help you choose the best one to address specific programming problems in Python. The Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook begins with recipes on containers and data structures and guides you in performing effective text management in Python. You will find Python recipes for command-line operations, networking, filesystems and directories, and concurrent execution. You will learn about Python security essentials in Python and get to grips with various development tools for debugging, benchmarking, inspection, error reporting, and tracing. The book includes recipes to help you create graphical user interfaces for your application. You will learn to work with multimedia components and perform mathematical operations on date and time. The recipes will also show you how to deploy different searching and sorting algorithms on your data. By the end of the book, you will have acquired the skills needed to write clean code in Python and develop applications that meet your needs.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Fetching emails


Frequently, applications need to react to some kind of event, they receive a message from a user or software and they need to act accordingly. The whole nature of networking-based applications lies in reacting to received messages, but a very specific and common case of this class of applications are applications that need to react to received emails.

The typical case is when a user needs to send some kind of document to your application (usually an ID card or signed contracts) and you want to react to that event, such as enabling the service once the user sent the signed contract.

This requires us to be able to access the received emails and scan through them to detect sender and content.

How to do it...

The steps for this recipe are as follows:

  1. Using imaplib and email modules, it's possible to build a working IMAP client to fetch the most recent messages from a supported IMAP server:
import imaplib
import re
from email.parser import BytesParser


class IMAPReader:
    ENCODING...